STATNEWS.COM -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: John P.A. Ioannidis is professor of medicine, epidemiology and population health, and statistics at Stanford University. Respected globally, he has spent his career challenging and exposing bad science.] ARTICLE: Covid-19, has been called a once-in-a-century pandemic. But it may also be a once-in-a-century evidence fiasco. The data collected so far are utterly unreliable due to limited testing to date. The vast majority of infections are probably being missed and we don't know whether by a factor of 3 or 300. The Diamond Princess cruise ship is the only time an entire population was tested. The fatality rate there was 1.0%, but this was largely an elderly population. Even some so-called mild or common-cold-type coronaviruses have fatality rates as high as 8% amongst elderly people in nursing homes. Projecting the Princess mortality rate onto the the U.S. population, [and adjusting for various sources of uncertainty], reasonable fatality estimates vary from 0.05% to 1%. A fatality rate of 0.05% is lower than seasonal influenza. However, the most valuable piece of information ...

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SPECTATOR.CO.UK -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: John Lee is a recently retired professor of pathology and a former NHS consultant pathologist.] ARTICLE: There's another serious problem with COVID-19 UK mortality data: the way deaths are recorded. We don't really test for flu, or seasonal infections. This means respiratory infection deaths are under recorded. However, the list of notifiable diseases on death has now been amended to include COVID-19. But not flu. That means every positive test for COVID-19 must be notified, but not flu or most other infections. If we tracked flu or other seasonal viruses in the same way as COVID-19, they would show similar exponential increases in cases and deaths. For example, the US CDC publishes weekly estimates of flu cases. Since September, flu has infected 38 million Americans, hospitalised 390,000 and killed 23,000. This does not cause public alarm because flu is familiar. Much of the COVID-19 response seems due to ...

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VIDDLER.COM -- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Very highly recommended documentary. As you watch reflect on Hazar Imam's 2007 remark at the Aga Khan Academy, Mombasa: "A wise observer once said, it's not so much what we don't know that hurts us, but also all those things that we are sure we know -- but which are just not so."] ARTICLE: Darwin's Dilemma examines what many consider to be the most powerful refutation of Darwinian evolution - the Cambrian fossil record. Charles Darwin realized that the fossil evidence did not support his theory of gradual, step-by-step evolutionary development. He hoped that future generations of scientists would make the discoveries necessary to validate his ideas. Today, after more than 150 years of exploration fossil evidence of slow, incremental biological change has yet to be excavated. Instead, we find a picture of the rapid appearance of fully developed, complex organisms during the outset of the Cambrian geological era. Organisms that embody the major animal body plans that exist today. This remarkable explosion of life is truly Darwin's Dilemma and is best explained by intelligence. ...

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FIRSTTHINGS.COM -- The following is the most insightful statement of what is at issue in the evolution controversy that I have ever read from a senior figure in the scientific establishment. For scientific materialists, materialism comes first and the science comes thereafter: "We [i.e. the 'enlightned' elite] take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, ... in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, *because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.* ... We are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door." The prior commitment explains why evolutionary scientists ...

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YOUTUBE.COM -- TEDX: SALMAAN KESHAVJEE (DIRECTOR, HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL CENTER FOR GLOBAL HEALTH DELIVERY)-- [ISMAILI DIGEST ED: Dr. Keshavjee's TEDx talk was just published, 4 days ago.] ARTICLE: In this enthalling talk, Dr. Salmaan Keshavjee takes us through an understanding of how we can stop the spread of infectious disease, like COVID-19, having developed a global platform for eradicating Tuberculosis. By looking at community based health care delivery platforms in vulnerable communities, he helps us to explore how this model is replicable across different geographies and can be used in the future to tackle other health problems. Dr. Salmaan Keshavjee, MD, PhD, ScM,is the Director of Harvard Medical School's Center for Global Health Delivery since 2014. He is currently leading an initiative at Harvard Medical School on how to achieve zero deaths from tuberculosis. In 2005, he became a member of the World Health Organization/Stop TB Partnership's Green Light Committee for MDR-TB Treatment. From 2007 to 2010, he was the committee's chair. He has ...

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